Seven English Cities eBook

and skill.  The skill and the science have gone the way of the need of them, but the beauty remains indelible and as eternal as the hunger for it in the human soul.  Conway castle is not all a ruin, even as a fortress, however.  Great part of it still challenges decay, and is so entire in its outward shape that it has inspired the railway running under its shoulder to attempt a conformity of style in the bridge approaching it, but without enabling it to an equal effect of grandeur.  One would as soon the bridge had not tried.

All Conway is worthy, within its ancient walls, of as much devotion as one can render it in the rain, which begins as soon as you leave the castle.  The walls climb from the waters to the hills, and the streets wander up and down and seem to the stranger mainly to seek that beautiful old Tudor house, Plas Mawr, which like the castle is without rival in its kind.  It was full of reeking and streaming sight-seers, among whom one could easily find one’s self incommoded without feeling one’s self a part of the incommodation, but in spite of them there was the assurance of comfort as well as splendor in the noble old mansion, such as the Elizabethan houses so successfully studied.  In the dining-room a corner of the mantel has its sandstone deeply worn away, and a much-elbowed architect, who was taking measurements of the chimney, agreed that this carf was the effect of the host or the butler flying to the place and sharpening his knife for whatever haunch of venison or round of beef was toward.  It was a fine memento of the domestic past, and there was a secret chamber where the refugees of this cause or that in other times were lodged in great discomfort.  Besides, there was a ghost which was fairly crowded out of its accustomed quarters, where so far from being able to walk, it would have had much ado to stand upright by flattening itself against the wall.

VI

In fact, there was not much more room that day in the Plas Mawr, than in the Smallest House in the World, which is the next chiefest attraction of Conway.  This, too, was crammed with damp enthusiasts, passionately eager to sign their names in the guest-book.  They scarcely left space in the sitting-room of ten by twelve feet for the merry old hostess selling photographs and ironically inviting her visitors’ guests to a glimpse of the chamber overhead, or so much of it as the bed allowed to be seen.  She seemed not to believe in her abode as a practicable tenement, and could not be got to say that she actually lived in it; as to why it was built so small she was equally vague.  But there it was, to like or to leave, and there, not far off, was the “briny beach” where the Walrus and the Carpenter walked together,—­

     “And wept like anything to see
      Such quantities of sand.”

For it was in Conway, as history or tradition is, that Through the Looking-Glass was written.